the CRAIG VAN cast
Hey, I’m Craig. I've dedicated more than a decade to understanding the human spine. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learnt. Get started with my SPINE STRENGTH project - Part 1 is free. Subscribe and you’ll receive my work as I release it.
the CRAIG VAN cast
53 | 10 Lessons to end back pain for good
In this discussion, we cover 10 life-changing lessons to end back pain for good. Back pain is not only the most common injury worldwide but also one of the most depressing and debilitating. By understanding the central role of our spine in all our movements, we uncover the importance of prioritizing spine stability. Discover how sitting contributes to back pain and how addressing this issue can reverse the negative effects of a seated lifestyle.
We explore the foundational building block of all human movement: spine stability. Learn why developing spine stability is the simplest and safest movement practice accessible to anyone. Through fluency in the language of pain and understanding the cause-and-effect relationship, we can overcome back pain and make profound changes in our lives.
Patience and persistence are key as we unravel the deep teachings of back pain. This journey requires a long-term view and a commitment to making gradual, sustainable changes. By implementing these 10 lessons, you can reduce the risk of back pain, improve overall movement and quality of life, develop greater body awareness, and cultivate mental resilience.
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Bat pain is the most common and arguably the most depressing and disabling injury in the world. I've realized that the reason this is such a persistent and impactful problem for most people is because people don't learn the lessons. They don't listen to what this experience has come to teach them and, as a result, it just persists and compounds over time. I'm going to share 10 life changing lessons that I've learned from the back pain teacher through helping hundreds of people overcome back pain for good. This is in hopes that you don't have to go to the deepest, darkest corners of back pain before learning these lessons.
Speaker 1:Lesson one is that our spine is central to all of our movement. When we have that pain, nothing is easy and nothing is fun. Almost everything we do seems to aggravate it. There's nothing we can do to escape the problem in our spine. The reason for this is that our spine is central to all of our movement. I think the deeper lesson here is that if our spine is central to all of our movement, then it really deserves prioritization. It deserves a place in our movement practice every day and always. It makes complete sense why many of the movement teachers have spoken of the spine as central to movement, as central to youth and as the most rewarding investment we can make with our movement practice.
Speaker 1:Lesson number two is that nobody realizes how close they are to an episode of low back pain. Back pain is imminent for most of us and there's two big reasons why we don't realize this and why it is the case. Firstly, statistically it's a fact Two-thirds to three-quarters of people will experience at least one episode of serious back pain in their adult life, and those stats are increasing. More and more people will have to navigate this problem at least once in their lives and if I judge by my personal experience, I would say everyone has to be aware of this problem. I am constantly in contact, just through my friends, colleagues and family. I'm constantly in contact with at least one person directly personally who is navigating or dealing with back pain, and I think that speaks volumes for just how pervasive it is in our society and only increasing.
Speaker 1:So you take the fact that it is extremely prevalent and you combine that with what we know about how back pain develops, where it comes from, and an analogy that Professor Stuart McGill uses often to describe what happens to the materials of our spine that leads to the breakdown that is a part of back pain. He describes how we would break a paperclip. You don't try and snap a paperclip in one go. That would be extremely tough. But if you take that same paperclip and you bend it back and forth enough times, the material weakens at the bending point sufficiently that it eventually breaks on its own almost. And this is what's happening in the background in our spine, leading up to the symptoms of back pain. We don't realize it because of the lack of nerves in some of these harder materials and structures in our spine, but most of us are working our way slowly towards an episode of back pain, while being unaware of the breakdown we are causing, the deterioration we are causing in the structures of our spine. And so, no matter how good you feel and this is what I think we need to take away from this lesson is no matter how good we feel. Because the spine is so important to all movement and because back pain is such a high likelihood for all of us, we need to be educating ourselves and incorporating an element of prevention of back pain in our movement practice. Even if we have not experienced any symptoms yet, that doesn't mean anything. Your next or first back pain episode could be just around the corner.
Speaker 1:Lesson number three sitting is the main cause of back pain. Sometimes this fact gets a little bit underappreciated, because sitting doesn't directly cause back pain, like we don't just sit in the chair and get back pain. What happens is sitting disturbs our movement patterns over time once we've sat enough, and it also weakens a collection of our important structures in the body because of the lack of stimulus that would come otherwise if we weren't sitting. And then this combined deterioration in our movement and weakness in our structures that we've gotten from sitting. This then leads to back pain when we use a body weakened and disturbed by sitting in a range of other activities like lifting heavy things up or playing other sports or running or whatever it might be. The primary cause of the original disturbance is sitting, but then the actual experience of pain and injury might show up elsewhere because we've taken those disturbances and amplified them in more intense activities. This knowledge is valuable for in a few different ways, but for one we need to acknowledge this, because creating a revolution in our spine or back pain experience requires that we create a revolution in our sitting habits, in our sedentary lifestyle, and by fully treating our back pain, by reversing the causes or removing the causes of back pain, we inherently deal with a lot of the consequences of sitting. It's also important to acknowledge this causal link between sitting and back pain, because we will not achieve profound change in our back pain if there is not any form of profound change in our sitting habits or lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Lesson number four and this might be a slight expansion on lesson number three, but the mechanism through which sitting causes back pain, at least the main mechanism, is that sitting creates spine instability in our bodies because of the way we unconsciously depend on a back rest every most of the moments of sitting. Over time, we develop a lack of awareness and control, strength and stability of the structures that support our spine and the spine itself. And then the answer to this is that by developing or restoring optimal spine stability, coordination, strength, stamina, we are able to effectively deal with, heal, recover from back pain and we also reverse or unravel perhaps the main insult from sitting. I don't think it's a long stretch or big claim to say that restoring spine stability is the cure to back pain, and spine instability is the primary consequence of sitting, and so that is the connection between these two phenomena sitting and back pain, spine instability and spine stability. There are a number of important realizations from this lesson One, and I think the most important is that the deficit or deficiency we're experiencing is spine stability. And please note that this is completely different to what most people understand as core strength or ab strength. Yes, there is some relationship between core strength and our spine movement, but what it takes to develop spine stability is a lot more than core strength and we need to train, or approach the way we train, our core through this perspective, through this angle of spine stability. If we think about developing our core coordination and strength through the lens of spine stability, we are forced to come at it from a very different angle and we will get very different results.
Speaker 1:Lesson number five is that spine stability is arguably the foundational building block of all human movement. We've discussed in a previous episode how all movement is developed in layers, from simple to complex, and that the more we can break down a complex movement or pattern into simpler components and then focus on those components, add them back together, build them up again and then work our way back to the complexity, the more effectively we will be able to engage or execute with complexity. And then if we look at movement broadly, if we look at movement as a one connected journey from simple to complex, and we traverse all of the trajectories from simple to complex, back to the core of the onion, the layers of the onion, and we try and find what is at the core of most movement, all movement. One of the things I believe, the thing that is at the center of all movement, the building block beyond which we cannot break things down any further, is spine stability, and this is a comprehensive and optimal form of spine stability which involves awareness of our spine's position, coordination and control of all of the core muscles which support our spine, core and back muscles, and the ability to breathe competently, simultaneously, while aware of our spine and coordinating our muscles that stabilize the spine. This single pattern, which I'll summarize the spine stability well, if deficient in any way, will disable or compromise every other movement pattern and inversely, if we optimize spying stability, then our entire movement spectrum is benefited, and this is the one thing that this whole series is about. The whole collection of episodes we've been doing on Kaineri Keystone is built on this. Fact is that if we target this one thing, if we prioritize and optimize spying stability above all else as a basic necessity, and then layer on different practices, other movement practices, and we are in a very good position.
Speaker 1:Lesson number six spying stability is also the most basic movement practice, following on from what we discovered in lesson number five. We cannot reduce things any further in any meaningful way beyond spying stability, and that means that it is also the most simple, not only the most important, but the simplest movement practice we can engage in, and this makes it the best candidate for most people to begin their movement journey. Not only is it a massive risk if anyone leaves this out in their broader movement practice, but it is also a fantastic place for anyone to begin because of the simplicity inherent in it. What also makes it a really good place for anyone to start a practice, from wherever anyone is coming, is that spying stability is, by definition, a practice in safety. So even if you were starting again from injury or with injury or pain, then I'm not aware of another way to start a movement practice that's safer than prioritizing spying stability first.
Speaker 1:Lesson number seven injuries talk to us through pain. Pain is a language to be understood, definitely not ignored or suppressed or demonized. A signal, that's all it is. A signal of information telling us what's happening in our bodies. Low back pain and how I learned to overcome it with my clients and in myself, is based on Stuart McGill, professor Stuart McGill's protocol, a protocol which is undeniable success with high-level athletes and extremely challenging injuries. And a massive part of the protocol, especially in the early stages, is listening to the pain, reducing the pain. The goal is to make the changes necessary such that the pain diminishes over time. And we have to listen very closely to the pain when it presents, how it presents, what makes it worse, what changes improve it or deteriorate it. And we have to listen very closely and analyze, connect the dots between our actions and the symptom of pain, the signal of pain, so that we can make the relevant changes to optimize, improve and reduce our pain over time.
Speaker 1:There simply isn't a way to overcome pain, overcome back pain effectively and sustainably, without becoming fluent in the language of pain and paying close attention to what, or rather how, our actions cause pain to increase or decrease, and also coming to understand the different kinds of pain, the different flavors, qualities, intensities, sharpness, dullness. There is so much information inside of pain and the more attention we give it, the more we experience an intuitive understanding of what's going on, we are able to directly sense more confidently what's happening in our body and more confidently use that information to guide our practices. Lesson number eight back pain is a supreme teacher in the lesson of cause and effect. Cause and effect explains our movement development and our injuries and pain, following on from lesson number seven, where I explained how we have to learn to listen to our pain and to connect the dots between what we do and how we feel. So, too, this helps us learn the lesson that if we change the causes, then the effects change, that what we were experiencing today is the consequence of what we did before.
Speaker 1:And when we understand the deeper mechanisms of back pain, the build-up that happens over time, the fact that, even though it might appear to have come out of nowhere, in fact the causes or the foundations have been laid for a long time by our behaviors, by the things that we have done, the causes have been set in motion. And pain, back pain, injury they do not appear from nowhere, they do not come from nothing. We have to fully realize this fact to acknowledge or to understand and overcome back pain, even if it looks like that one sneeze caused you back pain and you are convinced it came out of nowhere and you did nothing to get yourself there, you are wrong. And as long as you believe that you will not access the power to change things because you believe that the cause of it is out of your control and back pain, in my experience and the experience of the people I have worked with, is a supreme teacher, or when we overcome back pain, it becomes a supreme teacher in the lesson of cause and effect. But many people stay stuck because they do not listen to this lesson. They do not appreciate the facts of the causality that explains all of the pain, all of the injury, all of the disability.
Speaker 1:Lesson number nine patience and persistence. The truth is most truly beneficial and significant achievements in life come from a slow, patient, steady, focused effort, accumulating the right actions over time and eventually compounding them into something great. Back pain, yet again, is the supreme injury teacher in the lessons of patience and persistence, because complete revolutions are possible. We can recover much further and much more effectively than even most of the academic literature acknowledges at this stage. However, to get there requires the kind of patience that is humbling, beyond potentially anything you've experienced before, to be able to build slowly from the smallest, safest actions, work within very tight restrictions, giving up a lot of the activities you love, patiently chipping away at what needs to be done in a safe, specific and intelligent manner and patiently progressing it over 6, 12, potentially 18 months, depending on where you're coming from. And if we are able to follow this kind of protocol, we can achieve a complete healing revolution, and the lessons of patience and persistence benefit everything we do, not just in our broader movement practice but in life in general, because this is how we achieve anything great, not through shortcuts, not through magic tricks through understanding what is the right optimal action, focusing on that and patiently accumulating those actions until they start to compound over time into something that seems difficult to reach initially. This might be one of the hardest lessons for people to learn, with back pain, because we don't want to start off as small as might be required, we don't want to have the patience before doing the things we love to do or want to do. We don't have the persistence to keep going months down the line, and this kind of low time preference composed of patience and persistence, is the juice that makes this journey possible and is a lesson that, if we comprehend and embody, benefits so much more beyond our back pain rehabilitation. My entire movement practice, since I have infused it with patience and persistence, has become a completely different journey. My only priority is that I keep moving forward, that I keep moving and that I keep moving forward. No rush, no hacks, no tricks.
Speaker 1:Lastly, lesson 10, back pain is arguably the most agonizing or depressing injury I have ever seen. I have seen it take mentally tough, confident, inspired people and turn them into self-questioning and depressed victims. I really appreciate lessons and observations like this because if this experience of spine insufficiency, back pain, can show me one side of the spectrum of how someone can be psychologically reduced from a creator to a victim, then what happens on the other side of the spectrum? That's always what I'm curious about. What if I take my spine to its potential? Then what happens to my psychology as a result of that? What is possible? That would be the inverse of the experience of powerless victimhood that I've observed on this end of the spectrum. This keeps me very respectful of the back pain teacher and also optimistic about the potential of my spine and what might be possible psychologically if I develop it in a way that increases freedom, that increases confidence, that opens up new opportunity and possibility.
Speaker 1:Those are the 10 lessons. Review them, revise them and incorporate them as much as you can. None of these can be easily installed overnight, but maybe the biggest message is to develop an immense sense of curiosity with the experience of pain, injury, movement in general. Why is this experience here? What do I need to learn to change it? How can I take responsibility to change my trajectory? These are some of the perspectives and the questions that these lessons lean towards. There is no quick fix. You don't just need to wait for this to pass so that you can get back to your life. No, this is a learning experience and if we do not learn and change, then things will stay the same. Because of the nature of accumulating action and compounding consequences. They actually won't stay the same. If we keep accumulating the same causes, then the effects we'll experience will accumulate and then compound, so things will worsen. So we have to listen, we have to learn, we have to change or things will stay the same, and that means worsen.